This feature is where I spotlight older, recent, or upcoming releases I am looking forward to. The lists will include all genres I like to read, everything from picture books to comics, children’s lit to adult fiction!

This week: upcoming young adult titles from two must-read authors! First up we have the latest from Brenna Yovanoff, called Places No One Knows. If you are into the well-written and moody macabre, or anything suspenseful and strange, then Yovanoff is a go-to YA author for that. I adore her writing- Paper Valentine and The Space Between are two favourites- and am always impressed how she creates such utterly eerie, unsettling, and moving stories. Places No One Knows looks and sounds so very intriguing and I cannot wait to read it. Second up is Canadian author Teresa Toten‘s Beware That Girl. Toten may be best known for her incredible YA novel The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B. It was a Governor General’s Award Winner and my favourite teen novel in the year in which it came out. (I would argue still the best YA novel to date to deal with mental illness, specifically OCD, anxiety and hoarding). Beware That Girl sounds like quite something different: a twisted psychological thriller set amongst privileged teens and those clawing their way to the top social ranks. I am so curious about reading this one- to see how Toten takes on something so completely different from The Unlikely Hero.

Waverly Camdenmar spends her nights running until she can’t even think. Then the sun comes up, life goes on, and Waverly goes back to her perfectly hateful best friend, her perfectly dull classes, and the tiny, nagging suspicion that there’s more to life than student council and GPAs.

Marshall Holt is a loser. He drinks on school nights and gets stoned in the park. He is at risk of not graduating, he does not care, he is no one. He is not even close to being in Waverly’s world.

But then one night Waverly falls asleep and dreams herself into Marshall’s bedroom—and when the sun comes up, nothing in her life can ever be the same. In Waverly’s dreams, the rules have changed. But in her days, she’ll have to decide if it’s worth losing everything for a boy who barely exists.

The Haves. The Have Nots. Kate O’Brien appears to be a Have Not. Her whole life has been a series of setbacks she’s had to snake her way out of–some more sinister than others. But she’s determined to change that. She’s book smart. She’s street-smart. And she’s also a masterful liar.

As the scholarship student at the elite Waverly School in NYC, Kate has her work cut out for her: her plan is to climb the social ranks and land a spot at Yale. She’s already found her “people” among the senior class “it” girls–specifically in the cosseted, mega-wealthy yet deeply damaged Olivia Sumner. As for Olivia, she considers Kate the best friend she’s always needed, the sister she never had.

When the handsome and whip-smart Mark Redkin joins the Waverly administration as head of fundraising, he immediately charms his way into the faculty and students’ lives–especially Olivia’s, although she doesn’t share what’s going on. It becomes increasingly obvious that Redkin poses a threat to Kate, too, in a way she can’t reveal and can’t afford to ignore. Mark has his own plan for a bright future and never doubts that he can pull it off. How close can Kate and Olivia get with Mark without having to share their dark pasts?